Books to Movies: The Great and Intelligent Excision from The Lord of the Rings

One of Jackson's most intelligent decisions was to not present the Scouring of the Shire.

In the book, Saruman--let go through mercy by Treebeard--and the still odiously sycophantic but increasing resentful Wormtongue make their way to the Shire and cause havoc. Despite all the rules and regulations and bullying, Sam, Pippin, Merry rally the "resistance" and defeat the bad guys. Frodo monitors the event and prevents it turning into a massacre. Wormtongue, as in the extended version, kills Saruman. 

It's a great sequence! And I'm frankly at a loss as to why people keep creating movies about everything BUT The Battle of the Shire--unless Jackson is saving it to do himself. 

It would have not only made a long trilogy already even longer, it would have turned the entire movie on its head. 

The pay-off in the movie is that the hobbits have directly and indirectly saved Middle Earth. This pay-off is the same in the book, but Tolkien never forgets that real consequences exist for real actions. Everybody in Gondor is happy but the effects of peace and more stable times have not yet entirely reached beyond Gondor and Rohan (and even there, there's a great deal of clean-up, including rebuilding Osgiliath, tracking down prisoners in Mordor's South; besides which, Shelob survived--and confronting Shelob is another potentially great movie!) 

The lack of "okay, life is complicated and bad stuff keeps happening and people can't relax" doesn't make the movie shallow. As I remark elsewhere, movies are deep in a different way from books. I'll discuss imagery in another post. For now, I will state that deepness occurs in moments. 

Tolkien can have more "where are they now" chapters and, to an extent, books demand this kind of wrap-up. But for a movie, it "reads" rather like an essay which brings up a completely different topic in the conclusion...and I turn the page, wondering where the next five paragraphs are. 

So not including the Battle of the Shire was remarkably smart. 

It would still make a fantastic movie of its own.